Cash-strapped Britons in dismay as overseas aid is squandered on consultants in Africa and Asia
April 17, 2015
By TREVOR GRUNDY
London, England - A first class scandal is in the making following reports that Britain is paying professional aid staff up to £1,000 a day to work in Africa and Asia as part of a vast spending spree to meet a government target.
Spending on a small group of consultants who work for a group of large companies based in the City of London and known as the “Top 11“ has doubled in the past four years to £1.4 billion.
Members of the public and politicians from several of the smaller opposition parties are furious.
“When people think of overseas aid,” says Philip Davies, a Conservative candidate at next month’s general election, ”they think of people who have had their homes damaged by an earthquake, a hurricane, or a tsunami – they don’t expect to be lining the pockets of consultant fat cats.”
He told Jill Sherman, Whitehall Editor of The Times: “This is what happens when you are judged only by how much you are spending. How you actually spend the money becomes immaterial. It leads to grotesque waste and overspending.”
Britain’s three main parties – the Conservative, Labour and the Liberal Democrats – support Britain’s legal commitment to devote 0.7 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to overseas aid.
The small but increasingly popular United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) says in a manifesto published this week that no more than £4 billion should be spent on foreign aid.
Because of recent economic recovery that aid budget now tops £12 billion. And there’s a rush to spend all of it, hence the enormous sums spent on consultants, most of who come from an elite group of companies whose executives have close links with British Government ministers and MPs.
An investigation by The Times has found that hundreds of so-called “team leaders” on aid projects in Africa and elsewhere earn at least £120,000 a year. Part time daily rates for consultants – many of them hot out of this country’s most expensive and elitist universities – pick up between £800 and £1,000 a day.
Garth Glentworth, a former British Government aid official, said that the Department for International Development (DfID) relies on outside companies to do work they’re unable to do themselves, apparently because of staff shortages. “It’s a jolly lucrative business, believe me,” he told the newspaper’s reporter.
An editorial in the same paper said that one of the coalition government’s “woolier ambitions” in 2010 (when it was formed between the Conservative and Lib-Dems) was to make Britain a soft power superpower. To that end, Cameron set a goal of spending 0.7 per cent of GDP on foreign aid. And he has stuck to this goal, even as GDP has grown. In fact, the government has enshrined it in law with the support of the three main parties. The editorial commented: “The result has been a rush to spend taxpayers’ money without due oversight, fuelling corruption in the developing world and lining consultants’ pockets at home.”
The paper estimates that £6 billion a year, or half the UK aid budget, is being channelled through costly consulting firms and international bodies such as the United Nations and the World Bank. This is because DfID claims to lack the capacity to administer enough aid projects to meet its spending requirements. But the moment DfID releases the money it loses control over how the funds are spent.
Said the paper: “Using UN agencies necessarily mean helping to fund their bureaucracies. Often it ends up funding corruption as in Afghanistan, where DfID has been forced to shelve a planned increase in finding the UN payroll project for local police because the system was being used to pay thousands of ‘ghost workers’ “.
It added: “And as Britain’s aid budget has ballooned, more than half the world’s advanced economies have cut theirs.”
While acknowledging a place for compassion in conservatism, The Times believed that Cameron’s generosity is nothing more than “a case study in waste,” and that vast sums of money are being assigned to projects not on merit but on their ability to absorb them rapidly and in order to meet an ever-growing target. It concluded: “The damage done by the 0.7 percent cent spending requirements is compounded by another arbitrary figure. Thirty percent of the budget, now standing at £12 billion, has to be spent on ‘fragile’ states where controls are necessarily weakest. Spending other people’s money is easy. Spending it well is hard. Whatever government emerges next month, it should think hard about ending a linkage that leads to abuse.”
